Last month in Las Vegas, Team Ankler hosted The Future of Entertainment program at NAB Show, convening voices from MS NOW stars Jen Psaki and Ari Melber, top dealmakers including Fred Turpin, global chair of investment banking at JPMorgan, huge creators Mark Fischbach (aka Markiplier) and Matthew Patrick (MatPat), to the CEOs of Funko, MoviePass and MicroCo, and execs leading the most innovative AI companies in Hollywood. Moderated on our Media and Entertainment Stage by Ankler Media CEO Janice Min, Series Business’ Elaine Low, Like & Subscribe’s Natalie Jarvey, Reel AI columnist Erik Barmack and Breaker Media’s Lachlan Cartwright, these panels explored the most urgent questions facing studios, creators, journalists, executives and anyone with a stake in how stories are told. Turns out, not everything that happens in Vegas stays there after all — you can watch all of our sessions in full at The Ankler YouTube. Here’s what you’ll discover:
M&A in Media and Tech – Consolidation or Stalemate
“Scale has never mattered more, and everybody is trying to acquire it,” JPMorgan’s Fred Turpin told a rapt NAB crowd. “The industry is spending $180 billion on non-sports content creation today. That’s double what it was seven years ago.” In that race to be the last few standing are winners and, as profitability becomes impossible to eke out, some losers. Turpin, The Raine Group partner Erik Hodge and Tom Ara, partner and lead at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, joined Elaine to explore all facets of the future of the industry as consolidation rocks every arena of media and entertainment. Signs for hope among the trio ranged from AI as a tool to democratize content creation to the post-Covid rebound of IRL experiences, like Sphere and Cosm (not to mention the smaller M&A targets still on the board).
MS NOW Playbook: Building Community Across Platforms
Over the past year, MS NOW has gone through a number of changes — including a new name for the iconic news platform. But even more important is its evolution into an independent entity under Versant, something MS NOW anchors Jen Psaki and Ari Melber and senior vice president of content strategy Marcus Mabry say has injected new life into the news net. “We’re in more of a startup mentality,” Psaki told Lachlan Cartwright on NAB Show’s MainStage. “We’re smaller, we’re mightier in a lot of ways, and that’s enabled us to be a bit more agile, too.” How? Heavy investment in MS NOW’s digital presence, featuring a summer launch — announced live for the NAB Show crowd — of a community app with both free and paid tiers.
Markiplier, M3GAN, Atomic Monster and the Scary-Smart Business of Horror
People still want to be scared out of their minds together. Atomic Monster president Michael Clear, M3GAN writer Akela Cooper and YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Mark Fischbach (aka Markiplier) kept returning to the uniquely communal thrill of horror — the nervous laughter before a jump scare, the relief when tension breaks, the feeling of a theater reacting in sync. “We chase the reactions,” Clear said. “What we want so badly is to move a group of people in a theater and make them feel something.” Added Cooper, “Even if it’s a bad horror film objectively, there’s still something fun that you can have with a group.”
Their conversation, moderated by Natalie Jarvey, also highlighted how horror is opening new doors into Hollywood. Fischbach detailed how fan demand helped expand his self-distributed film Iron Lung into more than 4,000 theaters — not to mention score $50 million at the global box office on a $3 million budget — while Clear pointed to viral YouTube creators like Backrooms filmmaker Kane Parsons as evidence that studios are increasingly looking online for the next generation of horror talent.
Stand Up, Stand Out: JB Smoove and the Business of Being Funny
On Curb Your Enthusiasm, JB Smoove mostly contains his gripes to the quirks of Larry David. In real life he sees a more dangerous adversary in AI. “When you let it drive, it’s a long ride,” he said in front of a packed crowd. “You’re going to be a passenger sitting in that damn seat, and every time AI pull over, you got to pay the gas.” He and Janice Min took the Ankler stage at NAB Show, where Smoove — in his trademark style — touched on everything from his new brand marketing business, The First Darrin, to salesmanship and the comedic alchemy of Curb. Smoove’s secret to professional longevity: Treat your career like golf. “You have figured your golf swing out to the point where you can put yourself in a square peg, a circle peg, a triangle peg, an octagon. It don’t matter,” Smoove says. “I can fit in any peg.”
Microdramas: The 60-Second Studio Surge
Initially popularized in Asia, microdramas — short, vertically-oriented narrative shows delivered in 60- to 90-second chapters — have made their way to the U.S. Head of vertical content at Dhar Mann Studios Erin McFarlane, Second Rodeo founder Scott Brown and MicroCo CEO Jana Winograde and chief content officer Susan Rovner are all riding the wave, and they joined Natalie for a conversation about the low-risk, high-reward format taking video by storm — that’s poised to change Hollywood too. “I actually think coming from a more traditional world, there’s so much to learn on a micro-series set,” Rovner said, who also that day announced her company’s app name, aTwist. “There’s an opportunity to change a lot of things in a positive way to bring down costs to allow more production to happen.”
MatPat: How to Retire From YouTube and What Comes Next
Back in 2022, Stephanie and Matthew Patrick (or MatPat to his millions of fans) sold their company Theorist Media — home to Game Theory and other wildly successful YouTube shows with more than 34 million subscribers at the time. It was an unusual move for the duo to make, but their mission since has been to change how Hollywood, the government and creators themselves understand the creator economy.
The Patricks joined Natalie to discuss their playbook for a smart exit and what comes next after leaving the company they spent more than a decade building behind. “You look at traditional media starting to show interest in partnering with creators, acquiring creators,” Matthew said. “How can we use those 13 years of experience to help ease the learning curve for those people? How can we bridge the gap between the traditional media space and the digital media space so that all ships rise?”
Trading on Story: Prediction Markets, Platforms and the Power of Fandom
Prediction markets haven’t just come for sports and politics — they’ve plowed into entertainment, too. Will McIntosh, president of digital platforms and ventures at Versant, mentioned how they even found their way to the Oscars this year. “I sat behind some studio execs who won a lot,” he said, “and they were on Kalshi all night during the [ceremony].” That anecdote put a big grin on the face of Kalshi’s head of partnerships, Will Brackett, who joined McIntosh and MoviePass CEO Stacy Spikes for a conversation led by Elaine Low about the future of, yes, betting on movies.
Spikes, the long-embattled chief of the subscription moviegoing company, recently expanded MoviePass into the space through Mogul, a part-daily fantasy, part-prediction market platform. “This is an evolution of social media where it is not just a thumb-up, thumb-down,” he said. “You’re putting something real behind it, and the signal gets really clear when that happens.”
AI as Creator: Who Owns the Future of Hollywood?
Hollywood may not be “cooked” after all, said Asteria CEO Bryn Mooser, who spoke alongside Secret Level head of studio Christina Lee Storm and Spuree co-CEO Michael LoFaso on this panel moderated by Erik Barmack. These innovators, each with deep Hollywood and tech experience, argued that while generative AI is already reshaping filmmaking, the technology’s biggest impact won’t come from replacing storytellers — it’ll come from lowering costs, speeding up workflows and giving creators more control.
Mooser dismissed much of the first wave of text-to-video content as “AI slop,” while also highlighting the idea that AI tools can democratize access to Hollywood filmmaking by lowering barriers for smaller creators, allowing independent storytellers to make ambitious projects with smaller teams and far more ownership over their work. “It’s never been a more exciting time to be a creator,” said LoFaso.
Screen to Shelf: Fandom and the New Collectibles Economy
For Eric Robles, showrunner of Netflix’s Stranger Things: Tales from ’85, story and character always came first in developing and making the animated spinoff. But the improvised gadgets and weapons the characters protected themselves with sure did make for some perfect-looking Funko Pops. Funko CEO Josh Simon and Robles joined Elaine to explore the intersection of storytelling and consumer products — something Simon says his company has perfected in today’s fast-paced culture. “Most big toy companies are working 18 to 24 months out on a development cycle,” he said. “Pretty soon, we’re going to be launching some technology that allows us to do it in a matter of weeks.”
